Abstract
Mircea Eliade's book The Sacred and the Profane was influenced by his experiences living in exile and studying Hinduism in India. He focused on the sacred-profane dichotomy in Hindu religious life, emphasising symbols, rituals, and sacred space/time.
The book showcased phenomenological approaches and comparative methods in religious studies, reflecting broader post-WWII scholarly efforts to understand religious structures and symbols across cultures in a period of advancing secularisation.
Context
Mircea Eliade’s Sacrul și profanul (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957) was written and published against several mid-20th-century contexts that shaped its themes and reception:
Eliade (1907–1986), a Romanian historian of religions and philosopher, wrote much of his influential work while living in exile after World War II. He published The Sacred and the Profane while based in the West, having fled communist Romania in 1940, later teaching in France, Portugal, and the United States. His exile status informed his comparative, cross-cultural approach and his concern with perennial structures of meaning across cultures.
Hinduism
In the Autumn of 1928, Eliade sailed for Calcutta to study Sanskrit and philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta, a professor at Calcutta University. He visited large areas of the region, and spent a short period at a Himalayan ashram. He studied the basics of Indian philosophy, and, in parallel, learned Sanskrit, Pali and Bengali under Dasgupta's direction. At the time, he also became interested in the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and the Satyagraha as a phenomenon. Later, Eliade adapted Gandhian ideas in his discourse on spirituality and Romania.
Eliade emphasised the sacred–profane dichotomy. He argued that for traditional Hindu religious life the sacred appears in symbols, rituals, myths, and sacred space/time, marking a qualitative break from ordinary profane existence. He developed the idea of hierophany, a manifestation of the sacred in the world. To illustrate how the sacred makes itself present Eliade used examples from Hindu temples, images (murti), rivers (especially the Ganges), and pilgrimage practices.
For Eliade, Hindu myths (e.g., creation myths, cycles of time) and rituals (e.g., yajña, festival rites, puja) re-enact cosmic events and restore sacred time, enabling participants to reconnect with an origin or archetype. He also stressed cyclical and mythical time in Indian thought. Eliade contrasted profane chronological time with sacred, mythical time. In Hindu contexts (yugas, festival reenactments, samskaras/rites of passage), rituals recreate primordial time and thus renew the world and the individual.
Eliade used Indian symbols to illustrate universal patterns. He treated symbols such as the axis mundi (Mount Meru, temple spires), the cosmic tree, and the mountain as archetypes that orient humans toward the sacred center, drawing on Hindu cosmology and pilgrimage practices as prime examples.
Phenomenology
The book emerges from mid-century currents in religious studies that emphasised phenomenology and comparative methods. Eliade drew on phenomenological approaches (religious experience as it appears) and on structuralist impulses to identify recurring forms and symbols across cultures. This reflected broader scholarly efforts to re-establish intellectual frameworks after the disruptions of WWII.
Eliade used phenomenological methods, especially attentive descriptions of lived religious experience and the structures of religious consciousness, and identification of recurring forms, symbols, and motifs across cultures. He focused on lived experience, describing religious phenomena as they appear to believers (myths, rituals, sacred time/space), echoing phenomenology’s commitment to returning to the things themselves, though Eliade was less rigorous about epoché (methodological suspension of judgement). Paralleling phenomenology’s search for essences, Eliade sought invariant structures: the sacred vs. profane (Eliade treats it as a basic modality of human experiences), hierophany (manifestation of the sacred in the world), myths (models of origin and authentic time), and ritual (repetition of archetypal acts).
Unlike Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Eliade affirmed the reality or primacy of the sacred as an ontological dimension experienced by humans, moving beyond purely methodological description to metaphysical claims. He also favoured typological and symbolic interpretation, rather than reducing religious phenomena to social, psychological, or material causes. This contrasts with some later phenomenologists who were more cautious about ontological assertions. Eliade was influenced by existential themes (being, authenticity, temporality), but he applied them to religious symbolism and ritual rather than to the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein.
Secularisation
Published during the Cold War, when intellectuals in exile contributed to Western debates about culture and meaning, Eliade’s work also intersected with renewed popular interest in comparative spirituality, myth, and the perennial philosophy. His framing appealed to both academic and general readers seeking alternatives to secular materialism.
The 1950s intellectual climate included debates about secularisation, existentialism, and the loss of transcendence in modern life. Eliade’s core distinction, between the sacred (qualitatively different, oriented to ultimate reality) and the profane (ordinary, immanent space/time) can be read as both descriptive and critical. He sought to recover how traditional societies experienced meaning and orientation through sacred time, space, and myth, and implied that modernity’s desacralisation produced existential disorientation.
The contemporary secularisation shaped Mircea Eliade’s work: it sharpened his focus on the persistence of the sacred, pushed him towards comparative-historical methods to explain religious resurgence and survivals, and framed his critique of modernity’s desacralising effects.
The postwar decades saw strong scholarly and public claims that modernity, urbanisation, and scientific rationality were eroding religious belief and practice. Confronting those claims, Eliade treated secularisation not simply as the disappearance of religion but as an intellectual problem and he sought to show how and why religious structures and symbols persisted, despite modernity. His agenda was pitched towards explaining continuities (survivals, symptoms) rather than documenting decline.
Reacting to narratives of decline, Eliade argued that humans experience the sacred as an ontological dimension of existence that reappears even in secular contexts (myths, rituals, artistic forms, “archaic” experiences). In the 1950s his major works highlight motifs showing religion’s resilience. He argued that secularisation becomes evidence of transformation, not annihilation of religious structures.
Against secularisation’s challenge that religion seemed to be changing form rather than disappearing, Eliade used a comparative-historical analysis to identify invariant structures (symbols, myths, ritual patterns) beneath cultural change. This led him in the 1950s to present broad typologies and universal themes (cosmogony, axis mundi, sacred time) intended to survive varying degrees of secular influence.
Secularisation’s most direct philosophical target in Eliade’s work is modern conceptions of time and history. He contrasted sacred time (cyclical, mythic, regenerating) with profane/secular time (linear, irreversible, historical). Eliade viewed secularisation as producing an impoverished temporal experience, history without renewal, which explains many modern anxieties and the recurrent return to mythic forms in literature, politics, and personal religiosity.
Secularisation functioned as both stimulus and test for Eliade’s scholarship: it motivated his focus on religious persistence and universal structures while also exposing methodological blind spots: his relative neglect of sociological explanations for religious change, his tendency to universalise, minimising social, political, and economic causes of religious change emphasised by secularisation theorists such as Weber and Berger and his favouring of phenomenology and symbolism over sociology.
From the 1970s onwards, scholars criticised aspects of Eliade’s method and claims: there were accusations of overgeneralisation, reliance on ideal-types, underemphasis of historical change, occasional disregard for colonial/ethnographic contexts, and insufficient attention to power, social function, or individual variation.
Summary
Chapter 1: Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred
Religious people see a clear difference between sacred places and ordinary places. Sacred places feel special and meaningful; ordinary (profane) places do not have that stability or structure. Sacred space gives people a fixed point to orient themselves in a confusing, similar world.
When a religious person finds a sacred place, it helps them connect with the world and with something beyond themselves. Building or marking sacred places shows a need for order, making a meaningful world out of chaos. Ordinary space stays neutral and unmarked.
Sacred spaces often appear through hierophanies, moments when the sacred shows itself and opens a way to the divine. Signs, rituals, and traditions mark and bless these places, reminding people that they are important.
Traditional societies treat their land as a small, ordered cosmos, separated from the wild unknown outside. Every settled place is sacred because it has been created, named, or consecrated in contact with the divine. Rituals used when claiming or settling new land echo the original acts of creation, turning chaos into order.
Building a home or a community imitates divine creation. Rituals (often including sacrifices) help establish and keep that sacred order, as if maintaining the sacred place also maintains the world.
The idea of a centre is central in religious thinking: a special point that links heaven, earth, and the underworld. A sacred place can become a community’s centre — their own “middle of the world” — giving people a clear orientation in life that reflects the divine order.
Overall, religious people try to live in a sacred world. By settling land, building dwellings, and performing rituals, they aim to recreate the cosmic order in their daily lives and stay close to the divine.
Chapter 2: Sacred Time and Myths
Religious people often see time as split into two kinds: sacred time and ordinary (profane) time.
Sacred time is special, cyclical, and repeats important events from a mythical past. Festivals and rituals bring people back into that sacred time so they can relive and be part of those original divine moments. Sacred time doesn’t move forward like a line; it’s seen as always available to be returned to. Each festival is a chance to experience that beginning moment again and feel its power now.
Ordinary time is the everyday flow of events without religious meaning. Non-religious people experience mainly this kind of time, which feels more mundane and focused on history.
Many cultures tie the world’s yearly cycles to sacred realities created by divine beings. Building temples and other sacred places shows how space and time come together in religious life. Rituals and festivals copy the acts of gods or ancestors. By performing these actions, people step into the sacred, renew their connection to the original events, and make their lives meaningful. Taking part in sacred time often brings moral duties: people must act in ways that keep the world in the right order. In some cultures, practices that seem extreme to outsiders (like ritual cannibalism in certain contexts) are meaningful acts meant to maintain cosmic balance.
Myths give people models for how to live. Rituals remind everyone of those stories and help keep the bond between humans and the divine. Religious experiences change over history. Some religions see time as cyclical, while others see it as linear. Judaism emphasises a historical line of events and covenants with God. Christianity highlights a key historical moment (the Incarnation) that changes salvation history.
Chapter 3: The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion
Religious people see nature as more than physical as it shows the sacred. The sky and heights point to the divine. Many cultures link top-level gods to the sky; these gods are often remote and step back after creating the world.
As societies focus on daily life (especially agriculture), local and fertility deities become more important than distant sky gods. In big crises, people still turn to the supreme gods. Water stands for creation, cleansing, and rebirth (e.g., creation myths, baptism). Human fertility is tied to the earth’s fertility; feminine earth goddesses often symbolise generation and life. Trees and plants represent the cosmos, cycles, renewal, and immortality in many myths.
Today, nature is often seen in secular, nonreligious ways, but traces of sacred feeling remain. Overall, nature and the cosmos are viewed as revealing the sacred and guiding human spiritual life.
Chapter 4: Human Existence and Sanctified Life
Religious historians try to understand how people with religious beliefs think and act, especially about important figures like Christ. Western scholars may know big Eastern religions (Hinduism, Confucianism) but often miss simpler, older forms of religion. European folk traditions can help explain those ancient practices. Rural European customs still show very old ideas that existed before Christianity. These traditions link people’s daily lives with the cosmos and treat the world as alive and purposeful.
In early (often called "primitive") societies, people see life as connected to the cosmic order. Humans are part of a larger divine world, so ordinary acts can be sacred. The body, a home, and the cosmos are seen as connected. The body is a small version of the universe and is used in rituals to communicate with the divine. Rites of passage (birth, marriage, death) mark major life changes. These rituals formally recognise a new social or spiritual status, unlike non-religious views that treat these events as mostly personal.
Initiation ceremonies often involve symbolic death and rebirth. They change a person’s social and spiritual identity and bring them into the community. Men’s and women’s rites may differ but aim for similar access to sacred life. Women’s rites often connect to fertility and childbirth. Death is seen as a passage into another form of existence, not an end. Rituals link life, death, and rebirth and give people a sense of meaning beyond material life.
Themes
Archetypes
Eliade was very interested in the psyche and this led him to theorise concerning the underlying human mental structures. He posited a structural element called “archetypes”, which he believed shaped religious experience. These archetypes had accumulated over humanity’s long history and shaped religious data in certain ways. According to Eliade,
“every man carries on, within himself, a great deal of prehistorical humanity”.
These archetypes are “‘living fossils’ buried in the darkness of the unconscious, which now becomes accessible to study through the techniques developed by depth psychologists.
An attempt was then made to lay out these “archaic” elements of the human mind because within them you would discover how religious experience formed. Eliade came to the conclusion that these archetypes were
“preserved in myths, symbols, and customs which still, in spite of any corruption, clearly show what they meant when they began”.
A Phenomenology of the Sacred
As a phenomenologist, Eliade's intent was to identify the prominent and influential patterns or structures of religious experience.
He intended to do more than just list patterns of religious phenomena as some other phenomenologists had done, but rather, through identifying select patterns to demonstrate an integrated morphology of the sacred. According to Eliade, “the sacred” refers to a distinct modality of consciousness and he wished to examine it via its constitutive elements. This would require identifying and describing some of the perennial aspects of religion, as well as approaching it through an examination of its structures, patterns, and forms of religious sensibility and behaviour.
The author was influenced by the German theologian Rudolf Otto and his notion of Das Heilige (The Holy). However, rather than focusing on the total otherness and irrational elements of the experience of the sacred, as did Otto, Eliade sought a fuller and more comprehensive account of the sacred itself. He wanted to understand the “sacred in its entirety". He introduced an important distinction between the sacred and the profane, which he dubbed the two modalities of experience:
“All the definitions given up till now of the religious phenomenon have one thing in common: each has its own way of showing that the sacred and the religious life are the opposite of the profane and the secular life."
The Profane
One of Eliade’s goals was to examine the relationship between a worldview motivated by religious attitudes and those in which this attitude is not given the same place. He argued that there are major differences between visions informed by religious sensibilities of the sacred and those which are not. The latter are unconscious of religious sensibility or deliberately reject or block it. This dichotomy is evident in the different sensibilities between the East and the West. Eastern religious sensibilities articulated the sacred modality, whereas Western views were influenced by industrialisation and technological progress and thus tended to display non-religious (profane) modes of apprehension.
However, Eliade believed that the sacred modality could lie dormant, unrecognised, or unconscious in non-religious attitudes and that even the most profane mode included traces or vestiges of the sacred mode of apprehension. Eliade was convinced that the non-religious mode had not obliterated the religious mode, but rather that the modern person might find it, “increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in archaic societies”.
This dimension has become more difficult to perceive, although “Religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe”. Despite the obvious religiosity of the majority of archaic peoples, the profane modality was also a possibility for them. However, for Eliade, this modality is far more characteristic of those living in the modern technological and industrialised world. In this latter world, one finds:
“the man without religious feeling… the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralised world”.
Desacralisation is synonymous with the profane and is a symptom of those modern societies that cultivate a secular orientation to the world. This modality, thought Eliade, manifests itself as broken and alienated, but no matter however strong and pervasive it became it could never be separated from the sacred. Eliade also claimed that these two modalities could only exist in relation and contrast to each other and, as such, he wished to flesh out the specific dimension of religious experience so as “to bring out the differences between it and profane experiences of the world”. This would mean that as a phenomenologist, Eliade would have to articulate both modalities, although he clearly favoured the sacred.
The Sacred
Eliade wanted to demonstrate, describe, and characterise the sacred in its multiple dimensions. He believed that the sacred was universal in that it applied to all human beings and he wanted to prove that the experience of the sacred is fundamental to religion.
One description of the sacred is sacred time and sacred space. Sacred time is circular for it occurrs periodically and takes place during religious festivals in which sacred events are reactualised. Participants would step out of ordinary time and into sacred time, the time of origins. A good example of this was the Babylonians, who physically acted out their creation story, the Enuma Elish, during the New Year period with drama and performances. Although the modern person engages in periodic celebrations, he does not experience them as sacred, as involving contact with the divine.
Sacred space marked a definite place or orientation, suggesting that some spaces and places are more important than others. The church is an obvious example for it
“shares a different space from the street in which it stands… the threshold that separates the two spaces… indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious”.
It is different for the modern, non-religious person who experiences the spatial aspect of his world as neutral.
Eliade wrote that the sacred becomes visible and accessible through the presence of a hierophany. This denoted a transcendent reality which “breaks through” in some tangible form within mundane existence that then becomes an object of devotion in a religious tradition. This could be one or more of many things, including stones, trees, fire, symbols, etc..., which express some modality of the sacred and a moment in its history. For the scholar studying religion, the hierophany discloses something about the sacred and something about religious man’s attitude. When the scholar has obtained information about a particular hierophany, she must then develop a coherent collection of its common features.
Axis mundi
Mircea Eliade popularised the idea that a mountain can be an Axis Mundi, which is an archetype of any sacred place that connects heaven to earth, gods to humans. It is a sacred, spiritual, or a holy center on earth. While the Axis Mundi appears in various forms throughout the world’s religious texts (as trees, pillars, ladders, towers, temples, altars, etc.), it is commonly associated with mountains.
Mountains are the nearest thing to the sky, and are hence endowed with a twofold holiness: on one hand they share in the spatial symbolism of transcendence, they are ‘high’, ‘vertical’, ‘supreme’, and on the other, they are the special domain of all atmospheric hierophanies (manifestations of the sacred), and therefore, the dwelling of gods. Mountains are often looked on as the place where sky and earth meet, a ‘central point’ through which the Axis Mundi goes, a region impregnated with the sacred, a spot where one can pass from one cosmic zone to another. From Mt. Sinai to Mt. Shasta and everywhere in between, humans have endowed mountains with sacred meaning.
Eliade’s Controversial Motivation Underpinning His Theory of Religion
The more controversial aspect of Eliade’s theory of religion is that his study was not a neutral project but one with vested ideological interests.
The phenomenology of religion and religious studies in general takes after Edmund Husserl’s notion of the epoché, the bracketing of personal convictions and beliefs, religious or other, when engaging in work. As such, it is never in the religious scholar’s right to show personal convictions in their work. The only convictions which should filter through the work are those derived from the religious community, group, or individual being studied.
Eliade’s phenomenology, however, was designed to serve an important religious function. It was a tool whose ultimate purpose was to enlighten human beings regarding the necessity of the sacred mode of consciousness, particularly over and above that of the profane modality. To Eliade, the sacred modality was a pure and unspoiled form of access to reality as opposed to the desacralised and the profane. The profane modality was the product of obstacles and could be overcome through a new comprehensive form of sensitivity and recognition of the sacred.
It is clear why Eliade’s theory is an affront to secular scholars of religion, which is essentially to say that it is an affront to all scholars of religion because all professional western scholars operate within the boundaries of the secular discipline of religious studies. Scholar of religion Ivan Strenski reveals that
“one way to look at Eliade’s approach to the study of religion is, then, as a deliberate (and contrary) religious assault on secularity – a turning of doubts about religion into doubts about secularity at its very roots”.
Although it was not Eliade’s aim to convert people to a new religious point of view, his goal was to convince secular people that they are already religious, particularly by showing how human beings depend upon religious archetypes within the inner workings of their cognitive faculty.
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